Newsflash! God was behind the Big Bang!

God’s mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said on Thursday.

“The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe,” Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

“Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God,” he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St Peter’s Basilica on the feast day.

While the pope has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, have been smashing protons together at near the speed of light to simulate conditions that they believe brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth — and perhaps elsewhere — eventually emerged.

Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were “mind limiting” because “they only arrive at a certain point … and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality …”

He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.

“In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality … we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth,” he said.

Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church’s image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.

Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism — the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible — and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.

But it objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God’s existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

12 COMMENTS

Scientific information comes from proving theories to be truth or fiction. To ignore the superstitions that we all learned from grandparents will stop our intelligence evolution. I remember Dr. Hawkin’s book where he reversed the expanding universe and brought it down to one mass that blew itself into our milky way. Our species evolved from the surviving mammals based on their size, brain development or some such information. That we did survive is not a theory!

The big bang is called “the singularity” and makes more sense than anything my family can come up with, My husband worked on the accelerator at Berkeley who were all convinced that only through science will we learn more about our species.

Reading the histories of most of the known Gods, the tribes had a problem holding them to their words. They needed a holy terror for sinners. When that scared off members, they designed a kind God who would forgive all sins, The problem is that this God had laws for them to follow. The priests then began to punish in the name of that God.

Carl, if we all believed in the same God, we might enjoy the ride. I refused to scare the hell out of my kids and pulled them out of Christian school. My older girl is a Buddhist and the younger is ? I am a confirmed Atheist and have paid for this decision within my extended family who all are Mormons. I have neighbors here who will not make eye contact with me for fear I am an old gray-haired Satan.

It’s amazing to what lengths ‘grand shamans’ such as the Pope will go to maintain the mythos behind their respective religion.

I was raised and educated as a Catholic, but as I became older and more curious in digging up ‘dirt’ on the Church and not just the inquisition you soon realize that this major religion is simply a manifestation the ‘evil that men do’ to shake down the ignorant, unwashed masses all for a buck or two along with demanding absolute, unquestioning obedience from these same followers.

People are getting too sophisticated to simply make it through life believing in ‘little children’s stories’ shored up by superstition.

The Universe is now thought to be about 13.7 billion years old. The Catholic church had it’s formal beginnings around 300 A.D. when early church bishops gathered to hammer out a belief system and to create an unholy alliance between said church and rulers that last until this day. They even determined which early church father’s writiings were valid and which were not…say what?! Comparing the past 1700 years of the church’s lifespan to the age of the universe is ludicrous and simply crushes any manmade theories about gods and religion under the shear weight of cosmic time and space. Even we as a race of beings have only climbed out of the muck of deep time during the past 6 million years. We simply aren’t all that.

We best learn to get along while we’re here and to enjoy our ride while in the cosmic amusement park of life…no?

Well I don’t believe either of these theories. The entire universe created from a single densely-packed speck of nothing? Ha. Riiiight. Methinks theoretical physicists outthink themselves too much.

As far as evolution goes, it’s pretty clear that every thing evolves. What started it all, I have no idea, but I would be more inclined to believe that it wasn’t just happenstance. But the God of the Bible? Nah, don’t think so.

There are things that we’ll probably never know. This is one such thing. But keep guessing every one. It’s fun to watch.

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